I’m literally, I think, today, just finishing up a piece for the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

For the egg?

Yes! NCPA, “The Egg,” this beautiful new arts center in downtown Beijing, invited five composers there, and we all traveled 6000 miles through China. Each of us is writing an orchestral piece which will be premiered there in December. The idea is that the piece will somehow relate to our experience there. And I’m sure we’re all thinking, How do we undermine that expectation? Maybe they were expecting a Terra Cotta Warrior suite, or a Great Wall Symphony.

What's your piece like?

Mine is more abstract and responds to the Chinese language, particularly the written characters, which are of course totally incomprehensible to me, but also seem to posses amazing energy and aesthetic appeal. If you are reading a Chinese newspaper, you see this continual stream of single figures. So my piece is like that too. Short little bursts of information, in three measure units. It’s an analog of me trying to learn Chinese script.

You were awarded one of the most prestigious composition awards , the Grawemayer Prize, in 2007. I assume you haven’t just been solely composing since then. What do you do when you’re not writing music?

Um, I have been solely composing! I go to MacDowell and Yaddo a lot, and I’ve been interested in parallel art forms. Other than that, I haven’t had that many separate projects that haven’t involved music, other than, life in general. I mean, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my romances. (Laughter)

You seem fixated on the concept of Time in your work: Time compressed, elongated, deconstructed etc. especially in “Time Machines,” written for Anne-Sophie Mutter and premiered by NY Philharmonic last year. What’s your fixation about?

Time is such an important medium for music. Rhythm and phrase structure are obviously products of Time. What people forget is that pitch itself is a product of Time, of cyclic Time; pitch is higher or lower depending on how many times the air column vibrates…So in a certain way, music is made up of nothing but Time in air.

"Time Machines" explores the difference between actual time, clock time and psychological time. What we are experiencing shapes how Time moves, so what happens in a piece of music affects the way we perceive time, so there’s a sort of circular relationship there. It’s like Einstein joking about people misunderstanding his theory of relativity. He said: “An hour on a park bench with a pretty girl can seem like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove can seem like an hour.” So the sense of how Time flows is very much affected by what we’re experiencing.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished two memoirs by friends, The Guardians by Sarah Manguso and Revolution, by Deb Olin Unferth. I'm also reading the Peter Acroyd biography of William Blake, and Martha Schuchard's William Blake's Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision.

In your piece, Bodymusic, the music of the 3rd movement comes directly after the sound of a recorded sneeze. It seems an unlikely inspiration. Why a sneeze?

A sneeze itself has all these religious connotations, the idea is that you die for a second, you let part of your spirit out. There is a sense of expulsion. You have Ahhh-Chhoo. In Bodymusic the “choo” becomes a pitch which gradually spins around the room and is taken on by the instruments, so everything kind of comes from this spewing out. I like the idea that it seems so implausible. It would be easier to do something comedic, but I didn’t want to something comedic.

It would make a good title of a short story, The Sneeze.

Well, you remember in Gogol's Dead Souls, when the guy returns, it’s his sneeze that he’s recognized by. It’s like a trumpet call, and they all say “oh yeah, there’s our hero.”

What were the recorded sounds for the movement called “After Sex”?

It’s more like pillow talk. You don’t hear what’s spoken but you just hear that calm of two voices, just in the distance.

You’ve been venturing into Multimedia, with Nightmazes and Next Atlantis. Did it bother you that Antony Tomassini, in a 2010 article, lumped you together with active, American composers that he characterized as “the middle ground”? “Those who more or less write pieces for conventional instruments, largely eschewing electronics.”?

Did it really say that? That’s actually factually wrong. It is irritating when they don’t do their homework. In a first rate organization like the Times, one has a right to expect more. I don’t like being lumped in that way. The fact is I’ve done stuff with electronics only since 2004 or 5, but clearly he’s not up on that.

You attended Juilliard School and MSM. Did you ever have a day job? Well, I taught full-time at Columbia, does that count?

What historical figure do you most identify with?

Historical figure? That I identify with? Oh, God, I have no idea. Like Salieri? Oh, I know. I’ll say Bartok. He seems human. He invented ethnomusicology, he respected music of other cultures. His music strikes me as very thoughtful, honest, amazingly well put-together, and very human.

What’s on your i-pod?

I have an i-pod. Two things, audio books, and music. I’ve been obsessive, listening to the same music. I know it’s all good stuff, but I repeatedly listen to Glenn Gould playing the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. And Horowitz’s Scarlatti. And Fleisher playing Brahm’s waltzes.

What is your greatest extravagance?

I'm not sure. Nothing, in a way. Well, except the fact that every day I wake up and just write music....that seems VERY extravagant!